New Project – d3RPG

Well, it’s about time I made it back here. I promised myself (and I guess anyone who’s reading) that I’d start putting my ideas out in public a bit more, and they’re not going to do it themselves!

The idea that’s taken all my time recently – to the point that I haven’t been able to sleep several nights in the last week – is d3RPG. It’s a roleplaying game that is designed to be simple enough to hear about the game for the first time, and be playing 10 minutes later (INCLUDING character creation).

Well, that’s the idea. Let’s see how well it works when it’s eventually all said and done.

I’m a big fan of the Pathfinder RPG, published by Paizo – one of the crunchier games currently out there. Which is a bit of an odd place to start your RPG obsession. It usually makes more sense to eeeeeaaaase yourself into something. Not to jump headlong into the maw of a two tonne shark. But that’s not how I operate. Clearly. Pathfinder was my very first RPG experience, thanks to the bundle put out a while back by the folks at Humble Bundle. (They’re really cool dudes. You should definitely check them out.)

A smorgasboard of nearly-free PDFs has led to a significant collection of books, given the small timespan involved.

It’s not the size that counts. It’s how you use it. But… I *really* want it to be bigger!

Since then, I’ve played in or run games in a few different systems, but nothing like the laundry-list of games that many longterm players have experienced:

A couple of those systems (Hero Kids and Savage Worlds) were tried specifically because I’ve also got a couple of kids running around at home (6 and 9 as of right now) who are champing at the bit to get involved in Dad’s hobby.

So with only a handful of systems under my belt, and less years playing than I have systems, what makes me qualified to write my own RPG? Good question. Nothing at all. But I’m doing it anyway, because my brain gets these ideas, and my pride won’t let me realise that they’re usually dumb ideas.

But also because of the small children I just mentioned. They want to play everything I play, which is awesome! But so many of the systems out there are too complex for them. And the ones that are designed for kid accessibility are not really detailed enough to hold the attention of some older folks like myself (at least, that I am aware of at this point). So I set myself the lofty goal of bridging that gap, despite never having tightrope-walked before. Fun times!

Now I find myself buried deep in system design for a d3-based system. Yep, those weird-lookin’ 3 sided dice. There are three reasons (coincidentally) that I picked d3’s as the core:

The fun reason is because I’m not aware of something like this existing, so there’s a lot of unexplored design space to work in.

The boring reason is that using one type of dice allows me to have a single probability table (*yawn*).